


Wet and Weary

by tetsugoushi (gitalee)



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Afterlife, Dead People Problems, Fix-It, Ghosts, Guilt, Haunting, M/M, Rating subject to change, Redemption, Resolving Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gitalee/pseuds/tetsugoushi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life may be a journey, but death does not signify a destination reached.</p><p>When consciousness returns after breathing ceases, Valjean finds himself on a barricade in the afterlife, and Javert on a bridge in the living world, but neither is a resting place.  Though they may have shuffled off this mortal coil, the two must face their lives and deaths before they can find peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He had died in the earliest morning hours of a summer’s day, but no matter that: he would never again be warm. He expected nothing more. Indeed, somehow Javert had always known that Hell would be cold.

The winds swept the river at a regular pace, as predictable as the tides, though perhaps only noticeable to one who was unable to leave. The winds were cold too, cutting through his wet figure like knives. It was the only thing he could feel, though, and a part of him relished the chill. In a queer, ironic way, it kept him feeling alive.

At first, he had watched the passers-by with great interest: the hurried men of business, the frazzled mothers, the gamin, and even the occasional officer on patrol, whom he would gaze upon with a studied indifference, striving to ignore any identifying features. He had never been taken to flights of fancy, and fiction had always sent him right to sleep, but as time progressed, he found himself imagining the stories of these figments, these flickers who walked in and out of his afterlife. 

Some, in his mind, were clearly criminals, with shifty eyes and pockets that bulged suspiciously, although he found himself more than once attributing to these more sympathetic backgrounds, good men fallen on hard times. Some were estranged from their families, walking alone with downcast gazes, or perhaps bereaved in the fall of the barricades. Some of the gamin had had mothers who loved them very much, and others had been birthed in alleys and left to rot, the fiction depending on Javert’s mood at the time. None of them had been born in a prison.

Occasionally, love-stricken youths would lean against the parapet and sigh, echoing the gusting winds. These were the most bothersome, and he never wasted the energy to consider their stories. For one thing, he could not understand the ones whose sighs were of a contentment that could not be expressed in mere words; for another, for those who were apparently spurned by the targets of their interest, he felt vague terror at the prospect of another soul taking up permanent residence on the stones of the bridge. Javert had never done well with extended company. A few of these were even female, which only magnified the potential horror.

In the rare event of such visitors, he had tried various forms of intervention, from cajoling in their ears to shrieking before their eyes, but although none of them had been foolish enough to follow in his footsteps off the bridge, he was fairly certain that his efforts deserved no credit, as the ninnies did not even flinch. They undoubtedly had realized, quite simply, that it was a ridiculous thing to die for love.

As time passed, though, no matter how much he clung to whatever sensation he could, days began to blend into nights into days, both in his eyes and in his heart. It had initially seemed to him that he was simply losing interest in the humdrum of daily life, that the faces around him blurred because they no longer held interest, or because he had already told all the stories that were within his capabilities, but before long, it became undeniable that the part of Javert that could not leave the Pont-au-Change could observe less and less of the goings-on about him. From the very beginning, sounds had been distant, faraway and echoed; scents had been utterly lost; touch and taste had been reduced to icicle winds and a gritty tongue. But his sight had held true, and watching the goings-on of the Seine and the bridge above had kept him alert and connected to himself, even in his utter isolation.

It was not his mind that was failing him; it was everything but, and that made it worse.

Of course, Javert had known all along that nothing that caused him even the slightest bit of pleasure or basic human contentment could last in Hell, and thus he had not been surprised to realize that it was becoming harder and harder to discern daylight from nightfall, let alone identify the faces of the living. All he could do was hope that his consciousness too would fade when the darkness in his vision became complete.

He hoped to disappear, but he anticipated his fate to be lost in the cold and the dark, damned to be forever imprisoned by the weight of a sodden greatcoat and the icy blades of the winds above the river.

\----

“But,” murmured what remained of Jean Valjean after he had left his body behind, “this cannot be eternity.”

Fantine’s soft eyes searched his, and it was only moments until he dropped his view to the wooden structure beneath their feet. He had never done well with being looked at directly, and the dead woman’s gentle and terrible gaze had threatened to burn into him as though he were looking into the sun. In life, even at her lowest, Fantine’s aura had had a clean, pure light that had brought strength and conviction to a man who called himself Madeleine (though now, he was merely Jean Valjean, and those days of fearlessness and righteousness were scarcely a memory). In death, she was radiant.

“My love,” she said, and Valjean’s head snapped back up in spite of himself, in spite of the weights that seemed to hang invisibly from every part of his being. The young woman laughed. She had looked so young -- a mere child herself, though glowing with the timelessness of heaven -- when she had taken him by the hand into a place their sobbing daughter could not see. When she laughed, this manifestation of Fantine became younger still, heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

“Forgive me. I have never been so called,” muttered Valjean as an apology, feeling the heat of a blush extend across his face, though he knew he no longer possessed body nor blood.

Cool fingers brushed against his face, and Valjean tried his best to keep his reflexive flinch as minimal as possible. “You are as red as yonder flags, Monsieur,” she said gently. “But don’t you see? Your past no longer matters. Everyone here is united in love, and you especially are my dear, because you raised my Cosette, my heart and my soul.”

He felt a familiar pang in his chest at these words, echoing that from when the Pontmercy boy had requested his daughter’s hand. “Then I suppose we are of the same spirit,” he said finally, when the tide of gratitude and jealousy and guilt had subsided enough to let him breathe, “for your heart and soul not only saved my own, but became them.”

She ran the backs of her fingers down his cheek, a maternal touch that life had scarcely allowed her to apply to her own child. He closed his eyes and listened. There were people singing.

“But this,” he began again, eyes still closed, “this cannot be.” It was painful to be reminded of the past, but, apparently, necessary. “Those boys died here; they failed to inspire the soul of Paris, so why -- and why me, why us? You did not live-”

He cut off his words abruptly, as though he thought it a breach of heavenly protocol to remind her that she had not lived to see the ill-fated June of 1832, had in fact missed it by nearly a decade. 

“But they died there,” he continued again, “and this place means little to me, save -- save something that is far from a pleasant memory, and-”

He wasn’t sure what else to say, and when Fantine did not speak for some long moments, he timidly peeked open an eye. She seemed to be waiting for something.

Tentatively, he raised both eyelids; she was not looking at him, but beyond, squinting at the massive barricade in the distance. Puzzled, he glanced down at his feet, and where before there had been the remains of what seemed to be all the furnishings in France, there was now soft spring grass.

“Already,” Fantine whispered, to him or to herself. “Monsieur, I thought -- oh, but you are no ordinary man in this regard either, so I see. No, Monsieur le maire, Monsieur Fauchelevent, Saint Jean Valjean, this is not your eternity. But I did hope that seeing what this place has become -- when they first arrived, you see, they did not sing but shouted and cried, and the structure was scarcely more than a few rocking chairs and mattresses -- might hearten you before your journey.”

With great effort, he fought off the instinct to repeat the final word back to her, but he could feel his face fall, and his shoulders droop. He was too tired to travel further, and too old, and he did not know the way, and he sensed that he could not keep the disappointment from his expression. Cosette had often told him that even though he kept his past a closed book to her, his face was often an open one.

“You smiled when you arrived, but so quickly it fades,” noted Fantine.

Again, Valjean felt the urge to apologize for his manners, and this time he did, simultaneously lifting the corners of his mouth, though they were heavier than anything he had lifted in his wasted youth. “Forgive me my rudeness,” he stumbled, “I had just -- not imagined that -- attaining one’s glory -- that is -- for me I had never presumed it at all, but when you guided me here -- did I say something wrong?” For Fantine’s features, so delicate in death, had begun to warp, but not, as Valjean had feared, in anger or disappointment; rather, she again began to laugh.

“Your heart is so big, Monsieur,” she said, when she was again able to speak; a soft chuckle still lightened her voice. Valjean ducked his head to hide his sheepish smile. She reached up and rested a pale hand lightly on his shoulder. “But, my love, this is not your glory.”

He raised his eyes to hers again, briefly, then blinked and looked aside. “It... is not?”

“Walk with me further,” said Fantine, and turned, heading toward a forest that had no place being so near the scene of an event that had happened in Paris.

Although all he wanted to do was rest, he could not but follow. Though her legs were much shorter, she covered distance quickly, and if he’d had the strength, he would have had to jog to keep up. But the strength that had filled his muscles when he’d first found himself reunited with all the children lost was ebbing from his body like blood from a reopened wound, and the best he could do was keep her diaphanous gown in his sights as she moved ahead, further and further from the barricade.

When she got to the edge of the forest, just up to the first tree, she stopped, turned around, and waited for him to catch her once more, shading her eyes from the rays of the sun with a pale, bare arm.

“It is,” he said breathlessly, forcing himself to put more spring into his step as he approached, “wonderful to see you so strong.” Certainly, he had never seen her so in life -- or if he had, when she worked in his factory, he had not noticed; yet another of his unforgivable crimes.

Demurely, she looked down for a moment, blushing like a proper woman, running her fingers through the long locks that had no recollection of having seen before. And had not noticed until that moment. Was that how she had always appeared? He fought back a comment, and instead waited for her to speak, putting to use his lifetime of patience even in the afterlife. She combed through her hair, then lifted her head to look at the sky, which still held the clarity of a summer’s day. “Soon,” she said.

“Soon?”

“You too will be so soon, I believe. I want to believe. Oh, Monsieur Jean!” He startled at the address, but now she had turned away from him, looking into the depths of the forest. “I will soon see you again, and we will have a long talk, and you will tell me everything!”

Little made sense, and the further they walked, the more Valjean’s mind moved with the consistency of old porridge. It took him far too long to make words for what he was trying to think. The brief clarity that had filled his mind when he had first set foot on that heavenly barricade had long since been covered by the fog that had blanketed everything he’d experienced since that day in June. “Are you leaving? You can’t leave! What will I do?”

She had stopped once more, where the shadows of the forest ended the pale green of the fields with a line that could almost have been drawn with a ruler. She gave him a moment’s time to reach her -- his legs felt so heavy, as though he were again trudging through the quicksand of a sewer, or, going further back in time, as though he were once again a youth with an iron chain clapped around his ankle for the first time -- and only turned to him at the moment that his shoulders aligned with hers, though not once had she glanced back.

“I will be waiting for you,” she said. That did not answer his question.

“But...”

“Everything is for the best here.” Another reassurance, but another non-answer. Her smile did not reach her eyes, which held his firmly.

He could not think of anything to say, so he smiled back, although he suspected his expression was even more conflicted than hers. He waited, but if the silence felt uncomfortable on her end, nothing in her face betrayed her thoughts, and he prayed that his own features were too ravaged by time and pain to suggest his own anxiety to the woman; it wouldn’t be fair of him to make her feel at all discomfited, as she had already taken on more than her share of suffering in her short life.

At length, she broke the silence. “What do you hear?”

The momentary spell was broken, and he blinked away his thoughts. He realized then that he could no longer hear the singing at the barricade, and though they stood on the perimeter of a dark and mighty forest, he could not hear a leaf’s rustle, a squirrel’s chatter or the faintest note of a bird’s song. He closed his eyes, but could still detect nothing. The silence was oppressive, and for the first time, Jean Valjean realized that fear, perhaps even more than love, was anchored to the soul.

Fending off a gasp, he remembered the feeling he’d had when he’d seen his daughter and her -- her husband -- come dashing to his deathbed. She had embraced him, and cried, and he’d felt his last moments on earth breathing in her love, but when he’d first seen her burst through the door, he’d felt a cold wave of terror wash over him, wondering if she had come at the last possible instant to reject him, her cowardly guardian, forever and for good. He had thought Fantine had led him away from that chill, but it seemed now that the small shelter she had provided had been washed out once more by the tide.

“Nothing,” he said, and his voice trembled, but did not echo. He kept his eyes closed.

“You will,” she said, and touched his face for the last time. “Follow it.”

When he opened his eyes, she was gone.

But at last, he knew something; he knew where he stood. The forest was still, dark and deep, and there had been a time he had used their nature to his advantage; it had saved his life, and more importantly, provided for Cosette. It was no surprise that Fantine would have taken him here to start whatever journey he was meant to embark upon.

He took one step forward, alone, and his legs ached. He took a second step anyway, and a third, and with that, disappeared into the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is a combination of two influences: 
> 
> One, my attempt to work out my anger toward Valjean's damned martyrdom at the end of the brick. I can't remember the last time I was so angry at a fictional character, breaking his and his child's heart out of what he sees as propriety, but what I read as a cruel, idiot pride.
> 
> Two, a prompt from the kinkmeme: "Instead of haunting Valjean, Javert lingers at Pont Au Change instead since it is the place of his death. Does he appear to other would-be jumpers and talk them out of it? Does Valjean hear the rumors that the bridge is haunted and try to communicate with him? Anything goes, I just want something based on the premise that ghost!Javert is unable to leave the bridge and spends his time haunting it." I appreciate the inspiration!


	2. Chapter 2

As he breached the boundary of sunlight from the fields into the wood, Jean Valjean knew he was not lost: he easily spotted familiar landmarks, peculiarly knotted trees and odd-shaped stones. He could almost trace the path to his hiding place with his eyes closed, but he kept glancing about him as he walked nonetheless. Despite the identical features, the woods in his memory were not quite like this; he had generally if not exclusively been experiencing a degree of mental disarray when he came to leave or take his buried treasures, but the ambiance had always been soothing to the point of irritation, less calming than defiant, the rustles and twitters and chatters refusing to let one troubled man break the idyll.

Now, they were silent.

He did not know if this place were part of the Lord’s Heaven (though he knew it wasn’t his own), or some form of Purgatory in which he must first toil, or -- God forbid -- a part of the living world in which he was but a shade, experiencing a lesser form of reality. Regardless, his environment felt substantial enough, and as real as mother earth had ever seemed to him. He wasn’t sure whether he preferred it this way, or if he would rather have had the afterlife a more ethereal place, but such a choice was clearly not his to make. Jean Valjean was used to enduring circumstances beyond his control.

A low fog crept along the loam, sneaking over boulders and roots, but Valjean had always had the devil’s luck here, and did not trip. Still, when he stubbed his toe on a bit of hidden granite, he hissed, and found that when the pain subsided enough for him to resume his already-slow pace, his leg dragged as though he had just been released from Toulon, churning mud in his wake.

Even in death, it seemed, he would never be free of that place.

But, as was the only thing he knew how to do, he kept going, the more fool he. The only time he had ceased to struggle on, truly, was when he had given himself up at the very end, not to the policeman who had dogged him for half his life, but to a larger purpose: his angel’s happiness.

Had it been worth it? She had cried at the very end, and he had never liked to see her cry, but he had gotten to see her, told her what he’d carried within his heart for so long, and in turn received her blessing and love, and the name of “father” once more.

If she’d come sooner, might she have saved him?

Ah, he thought, putting an extra gasp of energy into lifting his sore leg, it wasn’t worth wondering about now. More importantly, he was rapidly approaching his intended destination.

The soul of Jean Valjean had been bought with recovered silver some years and years ago, but even before Toulon, he had known that there was something twisted in his nature, something that he had tried to suppress all the years of his life. He had ideas. He had often discovered within himself an approach to conflict or struggle that did not occur to most people. In some ways, it had bettered things for himself and those around him: some of his pruning techniques had lightened the burden of the shoulders of tens of gardeners in Faverolles; his glass manufacturing innovations had provided work for hundreds of workers, and more than sufficient resources to both raise a bright and beautiful child, and provide her with the dowry needed to hide her lack of status when the time was right. He had helped people, and brought good.

But if not for his flights of fancy, he would have never thought to solve one societal crime -- that of starving children -- with a direct criminal act of his own, and if his mind had not conjured up escape plans thereafter, he would have been released from Toulon much sooner, and never learned to hate. It was that part of him that would take a coin off a child and silver off a holy man, that part of him that would break parole, accept being mistaken for dead, brand his own arm to avoid torture, keep a growing girl confined to a convent when she could have been experiencing the world. Jean Valjean had ideas, but they often caused pain to others, and so he could not but detest this feature in himself.

And some of these ideas fell right in the gray mist between right and wrong. His reconstructed sou, hollowed and turned into a blade, was one of these: in and of itself, it had been a tool that had saved his life, but he was more than aware that it too was a weapon. How could he not, when he had first approached a fellow prisoner -- a former blacksmith, whose crime at the time he had not known -- for advice on how such a thing may be constructed, and the villain had smiled so wickedly that he had almost seen saliva dripping from the man’s fangs? And yet, he had still made it, even after seeing that look of evil.

The fog seemed to loop around one tree in particular, and Valjean approached it without hesitation. Here too was another of his ideas that had potential for great risk -- another concealed weapon -- but he had to this point only used it for harmless purposes; he would never tell a soul about it. Never. He had thought about sharing it with his people when he was the mayor of M-sur-M, but the memory of the leer on that convicted murderer surfaced in his mind over and over, and ultimately he had only made the one concealed pickaxe, which had saved his life and his possessions years ago in these woods.

Under the tree, he chose a particularly gnarled root with no hesitation; it came up easily in his hand, and he only had to shake it lightly to free the head of the tool free from the earth. Five even paces away, he paused, brushed away tree branches that had appeared to have fallen from the sky and landed in the shape of the cross, raised the camouflaged pickaxe over his head, and buried the iron in the soil.

He didn’t know what he was doing, but the fact that Fantine had brought him here, to these woods, meant that he had to check. He’d taken the box before he died, bequeathing everything he had to Cosette, but just like the barricade he’d seen before had not been the one that had taken so many lives, he thought this forest might not have been the one that he had wandered in the past. When, after some time -- much longer than it had ever taken before; had the soil always been this difficult to break through? had the pick always been so heavy? -- the tool struck an unnatural surface, he let out a sigh of relief.

A few more minutes exposed the entire top of his secret storage box, and with a silent prayer of gratitude, Valjean put the digging tool away, and dropped wearily to his knees to grasp the edge of the lid. All of the former contents were now Cosette’s, and if he opened it to find the candlesticks, the dress, the money, any of it, he thought he might cry. He steeled himself, but knew his personality well enough to consider it a lost cause.

With a soft intake of breath (strange, that a dead man would need it), he lifted the lid.

Inside was a small burlap sack, folded and small, with some vague shape that suggested some sort of contents, but nothing Valjean could discern. Not anything he had expected; indeed, not anything he had seen before. But it was in his box, his hiding spot, and by that logic, it was his.

As he clasped the bag, he felt a strange sensation begin to run through the back of his head, and he knew that this was not the end of what he was meant to do, and he knew that it was not yet the place to see what was inside this oddity. Making choices had never been easy to Jean Valjean, as he seemed to choose between correct and poor decisions with no more accuracy than a blind man at a dartboard, but this -- this sound in his head, it might have been the voice of God had it had any words, or feeling of love, or any sense at all.

But there was no form to it, no reason. It started as just a tingle, but it widened almost immediately into a roll of thunder, a roar, full of passion but completely lacking in emotion, the first sound he had heard in what certainly seemed to be a long time. He pressed his hands to his ears, but that did no good: the sound was within him as much as without.

It felt as though rapids had just started opened up inside his head, and it was that mental image that finally gave him not only the presence of mind to identify what he was hearing, but a direction.

He heard a river.

\--

_L'enfer, c'est les autres._

Though Jean-Paul Sartre would not write the words for well over a century, his countryman’s influential statement that Hell is other people would have mystified Javert only in that it was considered a philosophical notion rather than a fact of life. 

It was only natural, after all. With a different population, Toulon could have been a town hall, a shopping gallery, a cathedral, instead of a place of the damned. He would have generally preferred his workplace to his residence, if only his coworkers could cease the incessant blather. And if not for a certain person (for whom, he was certain, he was also the devilish “other”), he would never have chosen to die.

He was not surprised that Hell was cold; he was surprised that it was lonely.

Loneliness and the notorious Inspector Javert were not well-acquainted. Solitude, yes, but being alone did not bother him. He had been born alone, lived alone, and died alone. Though he often had a comment on a given situation, his conversational skills were poor; though he did not shy from touch, he had never felt a need for intimate human contact. If more people were like himself, he thought, the world would be a more orderly and efficient place.

When he had first felt his eyes flutter open beneath the Pont-au-Change, he had felt confusion, but that had quickly cleared when he saw the blackish mass that was his body being carried away by the current. He was wet, he was cold, and his neck hurt, but at the time, he had no sense of what being dead meant otherwise. 

For the first days, he wondered when the devils would appear, but if they were truly on their way to punish him, they were certainly taking their sweet time about it. At first he had laughed, as though being left to his own devices were something to be dreaded!

And then time passed, and passed, and passed.

Watching people was an amusing game to pass the time, and he was used to being ignored and overlooked -- indeed, as an undercover officer it was a desirable trait -- but he had never before gone for weeks at a time without a glance, without a word, without a soul stepping away from him in fear. Combined with the cold and the blurring of his senses, the unacknowledged desire for companionship became an undeniable ache. Sartre’s existentialist mantra may have been that every person is an “other” in another’s point of view -- we all may be someone’s personal Hell -- but Javert was coming to understand without an other, a person is no one at all.

Aside from attempting to scare off would-be suicides, he spent months refusing to even attempt to interact with others, but when the wanting became too much, he did something that he was not proud of, and tried to reach out to others. Anyone would do, he thought, but though he focused first on the gentlemen who looked like they may have some interesting opinions, and then the youths who looked like they may have open minds to a drenched wraith that had ceased to breathe, and then he spent hours just screaming and hoping someone would flinch.

Javert had always known that desperate men (and women) did desperate things, and he had himself proven that fact when he had let himself fall into the Seine rather than making an impossible decision, but he had come to realize that even suicidality was just a shadow of true misery. The ability to end things in an instant was a luxury of the living.

Sometimes, as he pitched himself off the parapet again only to find himself sitting harmlessly to the side a moment later, or when he ran across the stones spanning the river and found himself on the same side that he’d left, just as far from Our Lady as ever he’d been, he wondered what nineteen years felt like. He began to think that he was going to find out. And what then? No ticket of leave. Nineteen times nineteen years, perhaps, or seventy times seventy. He wondered when insanity would set in. Perhaps it was well on its way.

And then again, he’d thought he’d known suffering, he’d thought he’d known Hell, and then he felt his senses start to fade into darkness. He had ever been his only friend, but now it seemed that Javert would lose that too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They'll meet up next chapter, so please look forward to less emo and more horror. ^^


End file.
